Introduction: New Studies/New Organizations; Labor Organization in Latin America and Beyond

Abstract

This special issue of International Labor and Working-Class History seeks to understand how Latin America's trade unions and other workers' organizations have responded during the last three decades to the wholesale reorganization of their economies and polities, and how the history of worker organizations in southern Africa in this era is strikingly similar, despite surface differences in political and cultural context. In Latin America, workers faced monetary stabilization and neoliberal policies; the globalization of trade, finance, and production; as well as civil wars and military regimes that eventually gave way to civilian rule. From approximately 1930-1970, Latin America's modern labor move ments became powerful social and political actors that grew with industrializ ation and the rise of proto-welfare states. Today, the picture is starkly different. With few exceptions, decades of military rule and civil war, debt crisis and hyperinflation, globalization and neoliberal policies have left Latin America's traditional labor organizations and allied political parties severely weakened. During these same decades, new movements organized around a spectrum of social identities (e.g. race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, residen tial status, and access to land) have taken center stage in struggles for social justice, organizing working people in new ways. We seek to trace the complex pathways through which workers and their organizations got from there to here, and to examine the novel and innovative ways workers have responded to complex challenges on multiple fronts. In a previous special issue focusing on globalization and the Latin American workplace {ILWCH 70), we and our fellow contributors analyzed how government adoption of neoliberal policies as well as the broader phenom enon known as globalization had affected workers, and to a lesser extent, unions. There, we observed that the combined effects of the debt crisis, public policies favoring market competition and private enterprise, and changing global cor porate policies had eroded job quality, transformed the organization of work, and affected individuals and families involved with international migration. In this issue, that economic and social history forms the crucial context for the largely organizational and political story that we and our fellow contrib utors wish to tell. A key part of that story, however, is the evolution of